My father moved out when I was about 10, and I dreaded doing the same thing to my kids. I’d vowed never to do it.
We were in the final weeks of an 18-year marriage and Amanda had a question for me: “Do you think you could run a 5K?”
“Sure,” I said. We were still living together then, though we shouldn’t have been. I was a bit startled to hear her actually speaking to me. “You mean theoretically?”
“No,” she said.
The kitchen was one of the few neutral places left in our ramshackle farmhouse. In the 1800s, this residence housed three families (not always cordially, according to local lore), and since Amanda had filed for divorce the previous summer, we’d been doing our best—out of concern for the children, finances, and the messy logistics of separation—to share it too.
Amanda was pretty good at it, keeping up false cheer around the kids and robotic neutrality the rest of the time. I’d been less good with space sharing—starting fights after the kids were asleep, sending her long-winded texts from the next room, and leaving for unplanned trips when the stress of living together proved too much. Though I hadn’t worn my wedding ring in months, though we slept in separate rooms, part of me believed that if I stayed put long enough we might find a way to stay married, because I had no idea how else we could remain a family.
The race in question was a community 5K for girls ages 8 to 10, the culmination of a wonderful program aimed at promoting healthy body image and a sense of empowerment in our daughters. Amanda had run the race with our daughter, Lydia, the year before, while our son Amos and I cheered from the sidelines. I remember it as an extraordinarily happy day. But in this tumultuous year, Amanda was coaching the program and needed to hand out medals at the finish line; Lydia needed a new running buddy.
“Saturday?” I said. “A 5K? Sure, not a problem.”
I wasn’t a sedentary person. At least twice a day I would walk the dog a few miles through the pasture and timber behind our house—but I hadn’t run in almost a decade, not since a bad trail spill left me with a rather useless ankle and an unpredictable knee.
I was a few months shy of 40 that summer and full of self-doubt. Not only because the usual aches of early middle-age had begun to set in, but also because an identity I’d held for the past two decades, since I was 21 years old, was about to be taken away from me; our court date was three weeks away, and I knew that, barring some strange miracle, I was, for reasons I never fully understood, no longer going to be Amanda’s husband.
We’d already spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, counselors, and mediations with no luck. Yet, neither of us would move out. The emotional reasons were even stronger than the obvious financial ones: Amanda had been a stay-at-home mom for almost a decade, and she wanted to stay at home still. As for me, my own father moved out when I was about ten, after a long and messy break-up with my mother, and I dreaded doing the same thing to my kids. I’d vowed, in fact, never to do it. In marriage, for me, failure was not an option.
By race day, Amanda and I were barely on speaking terms. We understood that the clock was ticking, but we seemed no closer to an agreement. I wanted to tell the kids about the divorce; she wanted to wait until we had a clear plan. We’d argue in the mornings after the kids went to school. Afterwards, I’d take the dog up into the woods, fuming. Sometimes, I would throw rocks at the trees. I had a bench up there I called my “weeping bench.” Having a weeping bench is a pretty good sign that you must change your life, but I had no idea how to do that.
that week, I began to run beside the dog instead of walking behind him.
Outfitted in my lawn-mowing sneakers, snug shorts, and an ankle brace, I ran up a hill to a rural cemetery and then walked back down it, winded. My sweat smelled faintly of beer. My right ankle pulsed with pain. I limped home, Jesso trotting by my side with the expressive concern of a loyal bird dog.
I did this same routine four days in a row, twice a day, without improvement.
On Saturday morning, on four hours of sleep—I’d stayed at the bar late, with other divorcing friends, lamenting our fates—we headed to the race in separate cars, boys in one, girls in the other. This was how we often arrived at family events now. Our kids were used to this. Not me.
“We could drive together,” I said to Amanda. “Jesus Christ.”
She answered me with a glare.
the pre-race festivities included hundreds of grade-school girls dancing and singing along to blaring Top-40 music near the starting line. They sprayed their hair pink and green; they painted their faces. I looked on nervously, so afraid of publicly failing my daughter that I’m sure I had the worst case of butterflies there. To combat these worsening
jitters, I joined Lydia and her friends as they danced to “Single Ladies” and “All About That Bass.” I wasn’t the strongest, richest, or even the nicest daddy in town, but I believed I could be the silliest.
When Katy Perry came on the speakers, I felt my ankle loosening up, as well as my soul. I got excited about doing this. We lived in a small community, and we were new to it. Most of the other parents from Lydia’s team had no idea who I was. I was just some old guy doing jazz hands with the girls—Baby, you’re a fiiiiirrework—and I heard one mom murmur to another: “Who is that?”
Our marriage had been happy in many ways, until, the previous spring, a fight exploded about a deepening friendship Amanda had with another man, and soon a sudden quake of buried resentment and ill will broke the earth beneath us. I kept thinking we’d find a way to save ourselves, though each time we spoke, things simply got worse. The escalation of bad feeling and animosity seemed to know no limits. Was there any going back? I had asked her this often, and asked it of myself as well, but each time the answer just got to be a more complicated version of no. Yet who could deny we were a family that day, decked out in matching T-shirts, dancing to pop songs on the blacktop?
the race began and we started out in the happy pack of runners. Lydia is a fit, slender kid and runs with admirable ease. But that day she looked pained as we started out. I chalked it up to jitters—I thought she was worried that I couldn’t finish—and although my ankle already hurt and I was breathing hard, I said, “We got this, kiddo.”
But Lydia kept glancing at me with worry, like she was picturing us staggering across the finish line in dead last, me crawling on hands and knees while she walked beside me, mortified.
“You set the pace, baby,” I said. “I’ll keep up. I promise.”
I’m not sure she believed me, but she picked up the pace a bit.
At around the one-mile mark, I wasn’t feeling all that bad, but I noticed Lydia was slowing down again.
“I need to walk,” she said.
A lot of the other girls and their running buddies were walking by this point, but Lydia never walked.
“You okay?” I asked.
Lydia nodded, but her face looked worried.
My daddy instincts kicked in. “You need to pee,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
We broke back into a jog and I pointed out places she could go—a thicket of pines, scrubby shrubs near the creek.
“No,” she said.
I led her to a metal outbuilding just off of the trail.
“You can pee behind there,” I said. “Nobody will see.”
“No!” she said, annoyed with me as much as the situation at hand.
We jogged a bit more. Another mile went by without my really noticing it, because I was worried about Lydia. We rounded a corner and saw, near the softball diamonds 50 yards away, a stand of porta potties.
“Follow me,” I said and broke into a run toward the little blue sanctuaries.
“Is this allowed?” Lydia asked. “We can’t use those!”
“Just follow Daddy,” I said, and we sprinted off the course toward relief.
after the pit stop we both ran in an easy manner. I ignored the throb in my ankle and the tightness in my chest.
“Let’s pick it up,” Lydia said, and we did.
We rounded a corner at the two-mile mark and I started to feel like I could cross the finish line just as Lydia lost her footing on an uneven edge of asphalt. I tried to grab her, stop her fall, but she slid into the gravel on her hands and knees. A few onlookers and I gasped and tried to help her, but she was up faster than we could move, running again.
I caught up to her. She was bleeding from both knees and an elbow. The father in me wanted to carry her off the track, toward the first-aid tent, prevent any further injury.
She limped along for about a hundred yards, wincing, and then saw the straightaway that led to the finish line.
“Let’s run, Dad,” she said with a smile and determination that suddenly felt like a lesson. “As fast as we can.”
We turned on the best sprint we could, both of us limping just a bit, smiling and sweating in the late morning light until we crossed the finish line together, where Amanda and Amos were waiting to give Lydia her medal. She got a big hug and kiss from her coach, her mom, my soon-to-be ex-wife. What do I do, I wondered. Do I hug my wife? Give her a high five? Then Amos tugged at my shirt.
“I have to pee,” he said. “Bad.”
When we got back from the porta potties, I danced one last round with Lydia and her triumphant, sweaty, 5K-finishing friends, the only dancing dad. Afterward, one of the moms I didn’t know introduced herself and then asked, “Are you Amanda’s husband?”
“I’m Dean,” I said, shaking her hand. And then I told her the only thing I knew to be certain: “I’m Amos and Lydia’s dad.”
DEAN BAKOPOULOS is a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a professor of creative writing at Grinnell College. Summerlong, his third novel, was published in 2015, and a film version of his first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was directed by Bruce Thierry Cheung and released last year.
In 2016 Bakopoulos was a visiting writer in the creative writing program at Wabash, along with his wife, Alissa Nutting.